Grimm Fairy Tales Halloween Special 2012 Review


It’s Halloween month, so you can expect comics to cash in on all the scary craze! From the Marvel Zombies Halloween special to this thing, you can expect lots of spooky stories this month on page and TV. Grimm Fairy Tales is a perfect fit for a Halloween special, it’s definitely ‘grim’ enough. Of course when you have anthologies, often it could be hit-or-miss. Two of the stories may be really great while the rest are average to sub-par, Thankfully Zenescope’s Grim Fairy Tales Halloween Special 2012 brings some really good stories that are actually kind of creepy. (And at the same time tongue and cheek.) Looking for a good comic to read in light of Halloween? Look no further!

Here’s the official description from Zenescope:

The annual horror event of the Grimm universe returns here with five brand new tales of terror that will shake you to your very core. When a group of teens visit a deserted cornfield in search of good time they will find that fear has a face and terror has a brand new name. Enter The Sinister Scarecrow! Plus two other all new short stories in this can’t miss issue that has become a Halloween tradition.

Three teenage girls (what a surprise!) go to this ‘haunted’ cornfield to tell each other ghost stories. Sound fun? No? Wait until you get into the actual stories. In the first one, Island of Dolls, a man after hearing that his wife loves someone else goes to live somewhere alone, away from society. This one was a good Twilight Zone-esque start. The writing is great and the ghost girl’s tagline “My dolly. I dropped my dolly” throughout was pretty unnerving. The next one, Are You There?, is another very good one. (Fans of Japanese ghost films like Ju-On The Grudge will get a kick out of this story.) While the ending is predictable, still a fun story with a likable Asian main character. (Though there were no Godzilla references sadly.) The next one, The Clown, is perhaps the worst one. The writing was pretty off from the start, it tries to be tongue and cheek funny but it fails. (A baby sitter that uses harsh language?) It gets pretty cool later however, once we see the clown statue. The phone call from the sitter to the parents was the best part, especially that last line. Also the arts makes the ‘thing’ look extremely creepy. The final one, Jack the Lantern, ties into the cornfield. It’s about a serial killer (can’t help but think of the Joker in the early parts) that uses a pumpkin mask, and THE DEVIL appears. He isn’t spoken by name, it’s a given. (Love the artwork on this guy.) This story is the most important one, since it ties into the cornfield these girls are staying at. The final part is pretty brutal, but hey, no one said this would be a simple ghost story comic.

Overall, this was a surprisingly great read. The stories these girls tell are smartly written. This is definitely the perfect Halloween comic to pick up, it has ghosts, pumpkin-heads, dolls, clowns, and THE DEVIL. So go ahead, enjoy the Halloween time with this one-shot special.

4/5

 

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